From Lee Newspapers

ATCHISON, Kan. — Ghosts, black squirrels, mummified farmers. Kansas has it all.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the founding of the interstate highway system, I wanted to take a drive that avoided the interstates — the Wal-Marts of the roadways — and see real, homespun America.

My route would be the back roads where drugstore soda fountains and Mom ’n’ Pop diners still thrived, where roadside attractions abounded and where billboards and fast-food joints did not clog the arteries. I wanted big skies and sweeping landscapes where buffalo once roamed and where silos were the tallest buildings.

Hwy. 36, an antique two-laner that cuts arrow-straight across the top of Kansas, fit the bill.

Despite the state’s reputation as flat and boring, books have been written about the abundance of oddities, both human and geologic, found on the Kansas prairies.

Pam Grout, author of “You Know You’re in Kansas When ...” wrote of the state: “It’s by far one of the most interesting of the 50, yet it has never, like Rodney Dangerfield, gotten the respect it deserves.”

Over a spaghetti lunch, I asked one resident about his state’s reputation for weirdness. He pushed back the bill of his cap to ponder, revealing a bone-white forehead over a sun-stained face, and replied, “Well, in Kansas, people have a lot of time on their hands.”

That may be why one farmer sat in his barn winding string from his hay bales into what has become the world’s largest ball of twine.

Or why another built a concrete mausoleum in his yard, dug up his dead wife from the local cemetery and buried her there, and then had his own body mummified and enshrined in a glass-topped casket with a double-exposed photo nearby of himself admiring himself in the coffin. Pay $6 and you can stare down at the withered face, now 74 years dead.

The fun started immediately when I crossed the Missouri River into Atchison, in the northeast corner of Kansas, and found the town was named for a senator — from Missouri. In fact, David Rice Atchison was president of the United States for 24 hours, beginning at noon March 4, 1849. He snoozed for most of his term.

The world’s smallest presidential library is housed in the town’s restored Santa Fe depot and tells how Atchison became president when James Polk and his vice president stepped down at noon Sunday and Zachary Taylor refused to take the oath of office on the Sabbath, waiting until noon Monday. Atchison, as head of the Senate, was next in line and slept most of Sunday, although he was awakened occasionally by friends asking to be named to his cabinet.

Atchison also is Amelia Earhart’s birthplace, and a park on the edge of town honors the ill-fated pilot and other famed aviators.

From Atchison, I took Hwy. 7, also known as the Glacial Hills Scenic Byway, north to catch Hwy. 36. But first I made a quick stop in Troy to check out a rumor that the Home Place Restaurant sold only square pieces of pie. “It’s easier to portion — you can cut it faster,” explained owner Jeannie Ricklefs, who handed over a piece of rhubarb-strawberry. Sure enough, beneath the sprig of mint and scoop of vanilla ice cream was a square piece of pie. It tasted just like a triangular piece.

“This used to be a funeral home,” Ricklefs said of the neat-as-a-pin restaurant. “Up there’s where the caskets used to be.”

That reminded me of my next destination. I headed west to Hiawatha and found the Mount Hope Cemetery amid the farm fields on the outskirts of town. Standing just inside the entrance was the memorial John Milburn Davis erected in memory of his wife, Sarah, after she died in 1930.

Davis sent his and his wife’s measurements to an Italian sculptor, and commissioned 11 life-sized statues of the couple in marble and granite. Two of the statues of Davis show him missing his left hand, which was amputated after he cut himself with an ax in a farming accident.

“You want to see the ax?” whispered Bonnie Reetz, behind the desk at the nearby Brown County Ag Museum. She led the way to the basement where the ax was framed and hung on a wall. Although the Davis Memor-ial draws some 30,000 tourists a year, Reetz said the locals still don’t think much of its creator, who died in 1947 and was buried next to his wife.

“It was during the Depression, and the townspeople were horrified that he was spending all his money on statues,” Reetz said of Davis. “Hiawatha wanted him to build something for the city. We had no swimming pool, no hospital. He said he wasn’t going to build no small-town hospital, because it was a small-town hospital that cost him his hand.”

Down the road at Marysville, I went hunting for black squirrels. Local lore says the squirrels escaped from a traveling circus in the 1920s, and went forth and multiplied. After a fruitless search, I visited the Pony Express museum in town and there was a stuffed black squirrel on the counter.

“Try the city park,” said clerk Jill Schmidt. “But watch it. There’s a $25 fine if you run over one.”

Red fox squirrels scampered beneath the park’s tall oaks, and then, suddenly, like a passing shadow, a black-as-night squirrel bounded by.

It was easier finding Charlie Becker’s house at the corner of Sixth and E streets in Washington. Becker, who played the mayor of Munchkinland in “The Wizard of Oz,” lived in the house with his wife, Jesse. A couple strolled by on their evening walk and I asked if the little stucco house belonged to the Beckers.

“Three little people lived there; I think one was his sister,” offered the man.

The next morning began in Cawker City, where the world’s largest ball of twine sat under a pavilion. Frank Stoeber started winding sisal twine from hay bales in his barn in 1953. The ball now is bigger than a Buick and said to contain 7,801,766 feet of twine, weighing 17,886 pounds.

“Frank hadn’t been well, it was winter — what else is a farmer going to do?” said Linda Clover, the school librarian and unofficial keeper of the twine. “The third weekend in August, people come from all over and we wrap twine at a Twine-a-Thon. We have a parade and games. Honestly, there’s not a whole lot around here for entertainment. If you have lemons, you make lemonade.”

The ball of twine was going to be hard to beat, but I pressed on, and found the geographic center of the United States at the dead end of a two-lane blacktop just north of Lebanon. The U.S. Geological Survey says the center is the spot where a plane map of the lower 48 states would balance on a pinpoint if it were of uniform thickness.

A marker and an American flag stood at the spot, and there was a tiny white “U.S. Center” chapel with four one-person pews inside. Other than a meadowlark singing and the flagpole clanging in the wind, it was eerily quiet in Middle America.

Downtown Lebanon has seen better times, but Ladow’s Market was full of farmers eating lunch. The bill for the special of spaghetti, salad, garlic bread and pumpkin cake was $4.21. I left a buck tip and Debbie, the waitress, came running after me. “We don’t take tips,” she said. “That way we don’t have to pay taxes and we tell everybody we don’t have to treat ‘em nice.”

On the day before, the Kansas sky was full of clouds in the shapes of battleships and nuclear-plant cooling towers. But when I arrived at Brewster Higley’s log cabin on a farm north of Athol, the sky was “not cloudy all day.”

Yep, Higley was a doctor who retreated to the remote cabin on Beaver Creek and in 1873 wrote the words to “My Western Home,” which is known all over the world as “Home on the Range.” A plaque on the log cabin said Kansas adopted the tune as its official state song in June 1947. I saw no deer or antelope playing, but a turkey gobbled in the woods by the creek as I drove off.

My travels west ended in Norton, at the Gallery of Also-Rans. Banker Bill Rouse apparently felt sorry for the major-party candidates who ran for president of the United States and lost, so he had them honored in a photo gallery along with their bios on the second floor of the First State Bank of Norton.

Some of the losers — including Richard Nixon and George H. Bush — actually were winners in other elections. Curator Lee Ann Shearer refused to predict whose portrait would be the next to be hung. “I can’t really forecast,” she said. “I don’t even know who might be running.” Neither does anyone else.

I was on the stretch run of my four-day, 800-mile exploration of Kansas and spent the morning in Lucas, which is ground zero for Kansas quirkiness. From there, I detoured north on Highway 106 and found Rock City, near Minneapolis.

In an area about the size of two football fields, some 200 giant rocks dot the landscape. I had been told some were as large as houses, but the biggest ones I saw were the size of outhouses. Still, why were they in the middle of otherwise flat terrain? Geologists say they are deposits formed millions of years ago when the area was an inland sea. Whatever.

Heading east on Interstate 70, I couldn’t resist a billboard advertising the new Oz Museum at Wamego, which turned out to be a pretty little town that looked like a movie set itself. The museum was nice, too, although the ruby slippers on display are not the ones that graced Judy Garland’s feet. A highlight was the life-sized figure of the Wicked Witch, with a warty green nose, next to one of her monkey-faced henchmen.

My last appointment was with a dead horse.

“You mean Comanche?” said the clerk at the Super 8. “We used to go see him when I was a kid.”

When the smoke cleared after the battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, the only member of Gen. George Custer’s U.S. 7th Cavalry still standing was a big brown horse named Comanche. Wounded, he was nursed back to health at Fort Riley in Kansas and lived to the age of 29. When he died, the cavalry at the fort had him stuffed by the taxidermist at the Kansas University Natural History Museum in Lawrence.

But the cavalry stiffed the stuffer, so to speak, and the horse has remained in a glass case in Lawrence ever since. The display recently was closed for a makeover, and reopened with Comanche looking great in his cavalry gear, his mane combed and his coat groomed. “Comanche is back!” said a sign on the exhibit.

You know you’re in Kansas when a dead horse is a state celebrity.

Advertisement